论文总字数：40197字

摘 要

教师提问不仅能用来引发学生的注意力和好奇心，检测教师的课堂效果，训练学生的表达能力，还能用来引发学生思考，增进课堂互动。因此，恰当地运用提问技巧在英语课堂教学中具有重要意义。本论文讨论了教师提问的功能，分析了当今国内初中英语课堂中教师提问存在的问题，为了解决这些问题，本文提出了相应的提问技巧。

本文论述了四种提问技巧：情感技巧，问题设计技巧，问题实施技巧和评价技巧。正确的运用这些技巧能有助于提高教师的提问技能，改善课堂效果。

关键词：教师提问；功能；教师提问存在的问题；提问技巧

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 2

3. Teachers’ Questioning 3

3.1 The Definition of Teachers’ Questioning 4

3.2 The Types of Teachers’ Questions 4

3.3 The Problems Existing in Teachers’ Questioning 5

4. The Functions of Teachers’ Questioning 6

4.1 Drawing Students’ Attention and Curiosity 6

4.2 Checking the Teaching Effect 7

4.3 Training Students’ Expressive Ability 7

4.4 Triggering Students’ Thinking 8

4.5 Stimulating the Classroom Interaction 8

5. Questioning Techniques 9

5.1 Affective Technique 9

5.2 Question Design Technique 10

5.3 Carrying-out Technique 11

5.4 Feedback Technique 13

6. Conclusion 15

Works Cited 16

1. Introduction

With the increase of the international communication and interaction, English has become very popular and inevitable in daily life. It serves as a tool for communication and interaction. Thus the English teaching becomes an important task in nowadays’ China. However, the Chinese students are poor at listening and speaking, which obstruct their free communication with others. In order to improve this phenomenon, teachers ask questions to increase the interaction between students and teachers.

In English classes, the “ask-and-answer” between teachers and students are inevitable and necessary. Teachers’ questioning is used frequently to draw students’ attention and curiosity, check the teaching effect, train students’ expressive ability, trigger students’ thinking and stimulate the classroom interaction. With the popularity of Communicative Approach in English teaching in China, the communication and interaction between students and teachers are more frequent. Hence, questioning is used as an essential technique to realize the interaction between students and teachers. However, questioning is not as simple as it seems. There are specific rules in questioning, without which teachers cannot put forward effective questions. Nowadays in junior middle school English class, there exist some questioning problems that obstruct the teaching process, for example, most students are unwilling to answer the questions; some of the students find the “wait-time” too short to think over the questions; teachers prefer to pick up a particular group of students to answer the questions, etc. All these problems are not uncommon in China’s middle school English class but are often neglected without even being noticed. This paper is aimed to discuss about these problems and try to solve these problems.

With the intention to solve these problems in teachers’ questioning and improve the class efficiency, the thesis studies on the Socratic question and other previous studies on questioning. Based on these theoretical foundations, the thesis illustrates the functions of teachers’ questioning and puts forward some relevant techniques on questioning. The findings show that: teachers’ questioning is not only used to draw students’ attention and curiosity, check the teaching effect, train students’ expressive ability, but also to trigger students’ thinking and stimulate the classroom interaction. Thus, four questioning techniques can be used to improve the questioning effect: affective technique; question design technique; carrying-out technique and feedback technique.

To sum up, when employing the questioning device, it is necessary to take students’ expectancy and characteristics, both physically and psychologically, into consideration. Teachers need to realize that all the questions must be student-centered.

2. Literature Review

Teachers’ questioning is an important technique. Pedagogically, for decades teachers of different subjects have used questions extensively to help themselves understand the students, and also to help students learn the subjects better. Many English teachers and researchers have regarded teacher questioning as an important object in English class teaching.The history of questioning can be traced back to 400 B.C, when Socrates first used questioning as a teaching method. The Socratic Questioning is based on the practice of disciplined, rigorously thoughtful dialogue. The instructor pretended to be ignorant of the topic under discussion in order to elicit students’ engagement in the dialogue. Socrates is convinced that disciplined practice of thoughtful questioning enables students to examine ideas logically and to be able to determine the validity of those ideas. Also known as the dialectical approach, Socratic Questioning can correct misconceptions and lead to reliable knowledge construction. Although Socratic Questioning appears to be simple, it is in fact intensely rigorous. As described in the writings of Plato, a student of Socrates, the teacher feigns ignorance about a given subject in order to acquire the students’ fullest possible knowledge of the topic. Individuals have the capacity to recognize contradictions, so Socrates assumed that incomplete or inaccurate ideas would be corrected during the process of disciplined questioning, and hence would lead to progressively greater truth and accuracy.

Socratic Questioning is in fact a revelation that questions are not just asked by teachers to challenge students but to attain other goals. Just as Socrates puts that the students can organize their ideas logically and correct their mistakes during the process of answering questions. From the author’s perspective, in addition to these advantages, teachers’ questioning has many other functions in classroom teaching.

Banbrook and Skehan point out that “they (teacher questions) can be used to allow the learners to keep participating in the discourse and even modify it so that the language used becomes more comprehensible and personally relevant (Banbrook and Skehan 1989: 96). Amy B.M. Tsui concludes that “teachers’ questions have the triggering function of getting students to practice linguistic forms and of generating some authentic opportunities for them to use the target language for communication” (Amy B.M. Tsui 1995: 79). Therefore, effective questioning has a lot of functions in English classroom teaching.

In the author’s opinion, teachers’ questioning has the following functions: to draw students’ attention and curiosity; to check the teaching effect, train students’ expressive ability, but also to trigger students’ thinking and most importantly to stimulate the classroom interaction.

3. Teachers’ Questioning

Teachers’ questioning is one of the most important technique that embody the interaction between students and teachers. Teachers apply asking questions to improve the efficiency of class, to promote students’ participation and stimulate the interaction between students and teachers. As an important part in English teaching and a main approach for teachers to interact with students, teachers’ questioning has long been studied by scholars. The interaction between students and teachers in the classroom goes on through students receiving input mainly from teachers and producing output by themselves, which is hypothesized to aid language learning.

3.1 The Definition of Teachers’ Questioning

The word question can be traced to the Latin verb quaerere, which means to seek. A question is a sentence which is addressed to a listener/reader and asks for an expression of fact, opinion, or belief, etc. When it comes to the educational area, teachers ask questions in order to prompt students to think and respond to the teachers’ messages. Questioning is a universally used elicitation technique in classroom teaching. It is even viewed as a critical skill for language teachers because questions elicit students’ responses and then push further interaction. Questions have a lot of advantages in class. They are usually used to elicit students’ information and to encourage their classroom participation, to check the class effect, to draw their attention and involve them in the class, and also to stimulate the classroom interaction.

3.2 The Types of Teachers’ Questions

Teachers ask questions in many different ways. Different types of questions have different functions in English classroom teaching. The type of questions that the teacher asks usually affects the quantity and quality of the students’ responses. So far, there have been various categories of questions (Cao Yamin 64).

(1)Display questions VS Referential questions. Display questions are not real ones, which serve to elicit language practice instead of information seeking (e.g. Is this a book?). Conversely, referential questions are those used to ask for information unknown to the teacher (e.g. How do you like this book?)

(2)Open questions VS Closed questions. An earlier distinction is drawn between open and closed questions. The former refers to those that encourage various extended responses (e.g. Why do you like sports?) while the latter refers to those with only one single correct response (e.g. Do you like sports?).

The distinction between open and closed questions tells something about the kind of response elicited while the distinction between display and referential questions stresses the nature of the interaction generated by the questions.

For the purposes of examining the roles of questions, questions are distinguished into three types——procedural, convergent and divergent (Richards and Lockhart 1996: 356).

(1)Procedural questions. Procedural questions are related to procedures or routines that is for classroom management. They are opposed to the content of learning (e.g. Are you ready for dictation?).

(2)Convergent questions. Convergent questions encourage similar responses from the students, or responses that focus on a central theme (e.g. Do you often use computers in daily life?).

(3)Divergent questions. Divergent questions are opposed to the convergent questions. They encourage diverse student responses that require students to engage in high-level thinking (e.g. How are computers changing your daily life?).

3.3 The Problems Existing in Teachers’ Questioning

In recent years, with the implementation of the quality-oriented education, classroom questioning has drawn people’s wide attention. Unfortunately, the related studies, especially in foreign language classroom have not attracted enough attention in ELT (English language teaching) world. Besides, many problems are arising in the ELT world without being noticed. This paper will focus on the deficiencies on teachers’ sides. Due to the lack of systematic questioning skills, many teachers take questions as a time-filling tool in English teaching and do not put forward effective questions. As a result, it is not uncommon to see the phenomenon as follows:

The quantity of display questions in the English classroom overwhelms the quantity of referential questions. It dampens the students’ enthusiasm for communication and makes the class dull and boring.

There is not adequate wait-time after question-asking and students rarely have enough time to formulate appropriate answers.

Teachers’ questions are always answered by whole-class or appointed to a special group of students. Volunteers are rare. The unfair distribution of questioning will lead to the imbalanced development of students and cause harm to their long term development.

Teachers provide feedback for most students’ answers, but still no feedback or further exploration for some answers. Further more, most active feedbacks are simple active feedbacks;

Interaction between students and teachers are still insufficient. Learning to express one’s own ideas in English is the final goal of English teaching. Teachers need to pay more attention to this and create more opportunities for students to communicate and interact with others.

These problems arise separately due to the lack of preparation before class and inappropriate questioning skills in class, which will be discussed specifically later on and relevant suggestions will be put forward to solve these problems.

4. The Functions of Teachers’ Questioning

Teachers’ questions can be seen as the wheels and the whole class is the car which pushed forward by the teachers’ questions. The questions are asked and answered throughout the whole class and makes it dynamic and lively. Without the links of questioning, the class can not proceed smoothly and integrally. From the author’s perspective, teachers’ questioning has following five functions: firstly to draw students’ attention and curiosity; secondly to check the teaching effect; thirdly to train students’ expressive ability; fourthly to trigger students’ thinking; and fifthly to stimulate the classroom interaction.

4.1 Drawing Students’ Attention and Curiosity

Physically and psychologically, the middle school students, aged from 12 to 15, are not mature enough to learn new things independently and, to a large extent, they are easy to be distracted by other things in class and lose their attention to the class. The situation is worse in reading or grammar classes because these two classes are often very boring and mechanical for young students. Many students are seen to yawn and whisper in these classes. Hence, it is rather necessary to ask these students some questions to “fresh” them up.

Once being called up and answer the teachers’ questions, the student will immediately “wake up” and restart to focus on the lesson. They start to think over the questions and pay their attention to the teacher and the class.

The middle school students have strong curiosity and once they are interested in something, they show great curiosity and passion on them. It is the same in English class. If the teacher asks some questions that appeal to the students, (for example: which is your favorite food? why do you like it?) there is no doubt that most students will be eager to raise up their hands and have a brainstorming around this topic. Hence, questions can arouse students’ interest and curiosity, thus stimulate their thinking and create a lively atmosphere.

4.2 Checking the Teaching Effect

Questions are not only beneficial for the students, but also helpful for the teacher. Questions can help teachers check the teaching effect and adjust the class progress. The traditional class was always teacher-oriented. Most teachers cared only for themselves and keep lecturing without paying attention to the students. They did not consider whether the students can take in and understand what they say. The teacher-centered class dampened students’ learning enthusiasm and lowered the efficiency of the teaching.

According to the National English Curriculum, the class should be student-centered and teacher-guided. That is to say, more focus should be put on students including their language level, learning competence and receptive ability. Teachers ought to ask students questions to check the teaching effect and if they have understood the learning points.

Questions like “Are you clear about this point?” “Do you have any questions on this?” can be put forward to check the teaching effect. Though asking questions, teachers need to readjust the class progress, either speed up or slow down. Also, students’ confusion and problems can be solved after that. This seeming slow-down is in fact a make-up for some previous mistakes and doubts. In the long run, it will faster the teaching and improve the teaching effect.

4.3 Training Students’ Expressive Ability

In English class, students not only learn to grasp the vocabulary and grammar, but also learn to express themselves with the target language. Affected by the examination-oriented educational system, most Chinese students are better at doing exercises than expressing themselves in English. This has produced many students with high scores but weak expressive ability. The lack of English-speaking environment also worsens the problem. Students seldom have the opportunity to speak English and communicate with others in English. Therefore, students can not apply what they learn into their daily life. As a result, they can not use the concise words to describe the particular thing or express their ideas precisely.

Therefore, teachers need to create more opportunities for students to use the target language. Questioning is a useful way to train students’ expressive ability. Throughout answering questions, students not only practice their oral English, but also grasp the native expression.

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